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Tutorial: Pallet sofa part 2

In part 1 I showed how I put together the structure of the sofa, and now we’re gonna take a look at the cushion. I wanted to keep it simple and compliment the boxy shape of the pallets. Fortunately this also meant that the materials were easy to find on the cheap!

You can buy foam material by the meter or cut to shape in many places (I’ve used the finnish Etola on other projects), but I happened to be at Ikea when I was mulling the options for the cushion and got lucky: there was a 80×200 Sultan Fonnes in the discount corner for half the price! Being the easiest option, I just bought another to match and went home happy.

This is how I laid out the mattresses, one is whole and the other is a small piece from the end (you can see the cut Fonnes behind the sofa on the top pic). Cutting the mattress was easy: I cut the fabric cover with scissors along my markings and then sawed the foam with a hand saw. I used a wood blade with pretty small teeth in the saw. The bigger the teeth, the rougher the edges. On the other hand, a very fine-toothed hand saw will take forever to cut through…

After cutting I stitched the covers together with thick yarn – stitches hold better in the fabric than the foam. The Fonnes also have stitching on the fabric cover, making them look stripy, but I wanted my sofa to be smooth. To cover the stripes I bought some old comforter from the recycling center and laid it over the mattresses. It’s easiest to just smooth it over and cut the corners when you have it positioned like you want. The inside corner was a bit trickier, that needed some extra material from the cut away pieces to cover the missing piece. After it was laying like I wanted it to, I stitched the corners together and the edges to the Fonnes cover material.

I wanted a white couch and had just enough white canvas left over from a previous project. This is my plan on cutting the fabric, I find it’s best to draw a plan. The plan doesn’t need to be fancy – just take a look at the crap I drew! That way you’ll know in advance that you’ll have enough for what you need, or in case it won’t be enough, you’ll still have that piece uncut for some other project.

I started by sewing the edge pieces together so that I ended up with a long circle of edge. Then I pinned and sew that edge piece to the top piece, making sure the corners aligned. After fitting it on the cushion I top stitched the edges to make it look finished. With a fabric that drapes easier that might not have been necessary, but I found the thick canvas looked pretty messy without the top stitching.

I didn’t have enough to use the canvas on the bottom of the cushion, so I used some thinner cotton fabric for that. I got a piece just like the top but about 1 cm smaller all around, so the edges of the canvas would wrap under the cushion and be covered by it. The back seam I left open, so I could slide the mattress inside the cover. I thought about sewing a zipper in there, but I didn’t have a long enough zipper and I’m also hoping I don’t need to wash the cover too often. That’s might be a future project, if I feel like it at some point.

Then I discovered I should’ve spent some extra money to buy a white comforter: that bright color totally showed through and tinted my white cover fabric reddish! I definitely didn’t want a pink couch, so I had to sew another “under” cover for the sofa, this time from the thinner cotton fabric. After sewing I hand-stitched the lower back seam and figured I’ll just rip it if I need to wash the under cover as well. Then I slid the top cover on and stitched the lower back seam in a similar way, and called it a day. It took me about a week of evenings to finish everything, and this is how it turned out!

I hope you’ll find this tutorial helpful/inspiring! If you decide to make something similar, please let me know!🙂